6) Interpretation: Making a Difference on PurposeAuthor Sam Ham brings practical information to museum workers interested in interpretation, but he also shares what research tells us about how people process information.7) A Practical Guide to Museum EthicsAs the director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University, Sally Yerkovich brings her expertise to the fore in this interesting and useful book.8) House of Lost WorldsRichard Conniff puts together an enjoyable history of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. From its unlikely founding 150 years ago, the story is filled with both colorful characters and great moments in science centered around the amazing New Haven institution.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Thursday, December 8, 2016

Pinterest is a great visual tool (organized into "boards" of images linked to websites) for museum/exhibit/design folks.

I'd like to gather your recommended Pinterest boards (as well as your Pinterest tips and tricks) for a future ExhibiTricks post (and free downloadable document) that can serve as a Pinterest compendium and resource.

Pinterest can also be a great resource when looking for examples of interesting exhibition designs or ideas. The indefatigable Elaine Gurian has a fantastic Pinterest site called "Museum Educator" that has a number of thematic boards related to topics such as "Museum Architecture" and "Label Ideas."

Another Pinterest favorite is the "Recognition" board which has super examples of donor recognition signage (with a bit of wayfinding, too!)

So click on over to Pinterest for some inspiration, and then tell us about your favorite museum/exhibit/design Pinterest boards, as well as your best Pinterest tips and tricks, in the "Comments" section below.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Last, but not least, if you've recently seen an exhibition that you'd like to share with colleagues via my "Exhibits Newsline" column, just send me an email for details, so we can get your contributions into a future issue of Exhibition!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Are the people running museums really the best people to reach out to Trump voters as potential museum visitors?

The reason I ask, beyond the pragmatic concerns about the future of federal agencies like IMLS and NEH that help fund museums under a Trump administration, has to do with how and why people choose to visit (or not visit) museums.

It seems clear that emotions "trumped" more intellectual considerations of policy or character for many voters in this recent election. Might museums actually be better at increasing their audience reach if their appeal was more emotional and less intellectual? (Of course, many museum experiences are deeply emotional, but that's only true for the people who actually step inside.)

Many cultural institutions (including museums) are facing declining audiences and funding streams in the face of shifting demographics and attitudes. And while museum professionals constantly strive to broaden the communities they serve, should they be aiming more for potential visitors' guts rather than their heads? What can entice museum-shy or museum-adverse folks to cross the thresholds of our institutions?

What lessons should we be taking away from the election to Make Museums Great Again™?

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Sunday, November 6, 2016

Look, I get that the US election is important, but I'm begging you to take just a short break from the vitriol and doomsday predictions on both sides, and read a few of these interviews from some wonderful museum people instead.

One of my favorite things about museum people is their genuine capacity for sharing --- be it time, information, or expertise.

One of my favorite things about this blog is the opportunity to give a forum to colleagues through the ongoing interview feature on ExhibiTricks.

After hundreds of entries since I started blogging back in 2007(!) I've built up quite a "back catalog" of posts, including interviews with some of the most talented and thoughtful folks in the museum biz.

You can find their interviews by using the "Search Box" on the right hand side of this page (and searching for the word "interviews" natch!) but I thought I'd highlight a few you may have missed if you're a newer ExhibiTricks reader, or some that are just worth another careful read.

Think of it as a pre-election mental "palate cleanser." Maybe even a guide on working together with others after the election results are in ...

Click on one of the names below (in alphabetical order!) to start the flow of ideas and inspiration.

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Thursday, October 27, 2016

Gary Vikan was Director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1994 to 2013; from 1985 to 1994, he was the museum’s Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Medieval Art. Before coming to Baltimore, Vikan was Senior Associate at Harvard’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. A native of Minnesota, he received his BA from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from Princeton University; he is a graduate of the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors and the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.

What got you interested originally in museum work? In the late ‘70s, I was a Byzantine scholar at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC; by day I studied some of the most arcane subjects in the Greek medieval world, but at night, I taught adults in the Smithsonian Residents’ Associate Program. I needed to connect with people, and to make my scholarship somehow meaningful to everyday people. (Thus, my interest in Elvis as a modern secular saint.) And I wanted to use the art of the distant past, and the aura I personally felt surrounding this art, to make that connection to the public. The art experience is, for me, a spiritual experience, and I see myself as its evangelist.

What is your favorite exhibition of the many you worked on? I have two, and they are very different. One, from 25 years ago, is Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece. I especially liked this show because it marked the first time I was able, in a gallery space, to unleash the spiritual power of the icon. I could tell I succeeded, because the Plexiglass bonnets protecting the icons were covered with kiss marks. With that exhibition, I had brought the holy - the numinous - into the art museum.

My other favorite, from just a few years back, is Beauty and the Brain. This was a tiny, inexpensive show that I did in collaboration with a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. It was interactive, and invited visitors to choose their favorite among a multiplicity of subtly morphed shapes. Our aim was to discover if people are “hard wired” for certain shapes (think of Henry Moore); and the answer is yes.

What prompted you to write a book delving into the shadier side of the museum world? As I walked the galleries in the Walters giving tours, I became increasingly inclined over the years to relate the story behind the work of art, as distinct from the art history of the work. I found them much more interesting, as did my audience. Maybe it’s just that I’m a storyteller by nature. Anyhow, in retirement, I decided to tell some of the stories that I could not tell while still director. And it is true, lots of odd things go on behind the scenes in art museums, and I think the public deserves to know about them. After all, our collections belong to the public, and we work for the public.

How have museums responded to your book? No question I’ve irritated some museum people, and made others uncomfortable. But at the same time, I’ve gotten invitations to speak before museum audiences, so that tells me that at least some museum directors have the courage to open that “staff only” door and let their members and donors into the back-of-house.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about repatriation or return of stolen objects? I love The Cultural Property Observer, online, because it gives a balanced view. This is especially important right now, as the message mostly encountered in the media is that ISIS is somehow making hundreds of millions of dollars in looted antiquities from Syria and Iraq. This simply is not true, and if the US makes policy decisions (as it now is) believing that it is true, we are at risk going too far in closing our borders, and in curtaining gifts of works to our museums from US collectors - and thus endangering the ecosystem of antiquities collecting and gifting that has made our great encyclopedic museums.

What advice would you have for museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in making sure their exhibitions and programs manifest in ethical ways? Keep the public good and the public trust ALWAYS at the top of your thinking. And never forget that works of art are mute, and they, too, need advocacy.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums and museum oversight? Finding a way to reboot the antiquities trade in what I believe is our “post looting” world. My book is a window onto a very different time in American collecting of antiquities - 30 or so years ago. It was truly a “wild west,” of don’t ask and don’t tell. I’m glad those days have passed, but what we are left with right now is an impasse between established collectors and collections and museums, and thus, the public.

The rules for buying and gifting antiquities have simply become too rigid. And so vast numbers of great works of art cannot now be bought by or donated to museums. The key to the future, I think, is the Internet, and transparency. Put these hundreds of thousands of antiquities already within the borders of the US, but lacking full documentation back to the UNESCO Convention on cultural property of 1970, on the Internet. If legitimate claims of looting are brought forward by source countries, those claims should be entertained in good faith. But in the absence of such claims, over time, de facto title should be granted to the collectors or dealers possessing the works, which can then reenter the antiquities trade - and ultimately, end up in a public museum.

How can museum professionals promote ethical collecting and exhibiting of artifacts? The key, again, is transparency. The last work the Walters acquired when I was director, in 2012, was a medieval Armenian tombstone. A visually powerful and important work, and the only one of its kind now owned by an American museum. We could not fully document the history of the piece, so we went to the Armenian Embassy in DC, and asked them what they thought (after alerting the dealer of our intent). Fine, they said, we would be proud to see this work of Armenian culture in Baltimore. In the end, pretty simple.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” museum project be? I would love to partner with the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins, and neuroscientists around the globe who are exploring innovation, creativity, the aesthetic experience et cetera, and do a major show exploring the present state of the intersection of art (very broadly defined) and brain science. It is a truly exciting frontier, and I think I am (almost) uniquely suited to brokering a multilateral exhibition collaboration among cultural historians, artists (musicians, architects, and writers), aestheticians, social anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. And it would be highly interactive, and have virtual reality as a key experiential dimension. It would be a big and bold version of my 2010 Beauty and the Brain project. It is the emerging field of “neuroaesthetics.” It could be co-hosted by the Met and the American Museum of Natural History.

Thanks again to Gary for sharing his thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!

We'll choose one lucky winner at random from the combined entry pool of new subscribers and email submissions to receive a copy of Gary's book.

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Museumhive will promote informal gatherings of people connected with museums to explore new community-centered visions for cultural institutions. Museumhive will also host social events and create content via Google Hangouts and additional social media platforms in the process. Real-life meetups + virtual followup = fun & effective thought leadership!

The Museumhive project will start out by supporting six in-person meetups featuring presentations by national thought leaders. Join us in Boston on the evening of Wednesday October 26, 2016 at District Hall in Boston as we host special virtual guest Nina Simon via Google Hangout! You can sign-up to attend the FREE event via Eventbrite. I'll also be posting via my Facebook and Twitter feeds about ways to plug into the event if you can't join us in Boston.

Some of our aims for Museumhive (and we're just getting started!) include:

• Creating a series of meetups in innovative environments where museum staff and emerging professionals can socialize and explore new visions.

• Using live Google Hangouts with national thought leaders to serve as the hub for each meetup.

• Indexing and archiving the Hangout videos, summarizing the events on the museumhive.org website, drawing participants further into an exploring a vision of the community-centered museum.

• Preparing short e-publication summaries designed to help museum and other cultural institution professionals connect the meetup topics to their own experiences.

I'm buzzing with excitement over Museumhive! I'll continue to post here on ExhibiTricks and on my Facebook and Twitter feeds to spread the word and encourage IRL or electronic participation by both seasoned museum workers and emerging museum professionals.

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Saturday, October 8, 2016

SketchUp is a great, easy-to-learn presentation tool that is perfect for museum/exhibit/design folks. There's even a free version, now called SketchUp Make, and a browser-based version, now in beta, called my.SketchUp.

I know a fellow exhibit developer that calls SketchUp "AutoCAD for Dummies." While SketchUp may have a much more straightforward learning curve than other 3D programs, the results are beautiful and professional even for a clod like me. (The drawing above is a simple SketchUp rendering that I created for a museum project.)

But as with using every software tool, occasionally your realize there are simpler ways to accomplish things, or aspects of the program that you've completely missed --- a real D'oh! moment (to quote Homer Simpson.)

The website SketchUcation has come to the rescue with a free PDF guide they call "The D'oh! Book" jam-packed with tips and tricks that will make you a better SketchUp user and designer.

If you already use SketchUp, you need The D'oh! Book. And if by chance you haven't used SketchUp before, click on over to the SketchUp website and download a copy to try out!

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Thursday, September 29, 2016

Conversations (both inside of sessions and during informal gatherings) are always a hallmark of museum conferences. But I was especially taken by the notion of the extended conversations that occurred during the recent Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Conference that took place recently in Tampa.

Some of these extended conversations were built into the ASTC Conference schedule. For instance, several all day and half-day Pre-Conference sessions took place on Friday September 23rd with session topics ranging from Evaluation Tips to Developing Exhibits on Climate Change to Citizen Science.

Ok, they weren't all serious conversations ...

A great pre-conference session I took part in was an "Un-Conference" where several facilitators introduced provocative topics as conversation starters and then encouraged everyone in the room to have a 20 minute organic discussion following on from there. This format really provided some interesting takeaways and was a welcome relief from the "three presenters with PowerPoints" format that many conference sessions devolve into. One thing that especially stuck with me was the notion of "Followership" (as opposed to Leadership) that Julie Johnson introduced. Julie also shared this related article by Robert Kelley on the subject.

This year the ASTC Conference also featured a number of "Extended Sessions" that occurred for two hours at the end of the day, instead of the typical 1 hour 15 minute time slots for most other sessions. The Extended Sessions I attended used their extra time to provide more full-group question and discussion time, which worked really well. Extended Session topics ranged from Teen Programming to Mentoring to Computational Tinkering.

But my favorite Extended Session was entitled "High, Low, or No Tech? Choosing Appropriate Technology for New Museum Exhibits." The presentations and audience conversations spun around nicely, and we even got into an analogy comparing the challenges of presenting high-quality programs to increasing numbers of people to cooking great scrambled eggs for large crowds! (I guess you had to be there ...)

Here's your convenient technology analogy

Another extended conversational opportunity happened in and around the Poster Presentations that this year were set up for the entire two days that the Exhibit Hall was open. Many in-depth discussions were held with project leaders in front of their posters which probably wouldn't taken place in sessions.

Of course, for every rule there is an exception, and this year I moderated a "Flash Session" (quick 10-minute presentations on a single topic with Q&A in-between) on Exhibits and Environments. This concentrated burst of five different speakers from around the world presenting five compelling projects was positively received.

As a member of the ASTC Conference Program Planning Committee, I hope we can continue this notion of extended sessions and conversations during ASTC 2017 in San Jose! (If you'd like to get an additional sense of this year's conference in Tampa check out the #ASTC2016 hashtag on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.)

#ASTC2016

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Wednesday, September 21, 2016

"The Spirit of Rebirth", the theme of the recently completed AASLH (American Association for State and Local History) Annual Meeting, seemed to aptly capture perceptions of the host city of Detroit, as well as the state of the History Museum field itself.

This was my first time attending an AASLH Conference as a fully-registered participant, and I couldn't have been more impressed by how well the events and sessions were put together, and the warm welcome I received from History Museum colleagues. Even though I don't think of myself as a History Museum person, my first museum job (as you can see in the photo below) right out of college was working as a living history interpreter portraying a Civil War soldier --- for the Detroit Historical Society!

But what really struck me in Detroit about the session topics as well as the hallway conversations (where the REAL information exchanges take place at conferences!) was the emphasis on change --- in relationship to both content and audiences for history-centered institutions.

There were a number of sessions on topics ranging from food interpretation to early learners to VR approaches toward historical architecture where it was clear that History Museums were drawing from approaches that might normally be found in Children's or Science Museums, or even mass media (one food-related session was titled "Don't Get Chopped!" after a popular TV show.)

VR historical architecture in the Exhibit Hall!

Before attending the Detroit conference, I honestly had the perception that history organizations were lagging behind in terms of incorporating many innovative, interactive, and immersive approaches toward their content, but I feel that History Museums really have the opportunity to be in the forefront of the museum field in their interpretive approaches. (In that regard, I was happy to co-present a workshop called making/history with Lisa Brahms and Kristin Fontichiaro that explored how history folks can leverage the Maker Movement at their museums.)

making/history in Detroit!

The other evidence of true change I felt in Detroit were the conversations and sessions focused on ways for History Museums to become more welcoming and inclusive to the wide range of communities they serve (and want to serve!) Perhaps with the city of Detroit as a backdrop (a place filled with social and racial upheaval for much of its history) it should have not been surprising that folks at the conference were having strong conversations about topics such as reinterpreting slavery, sharing stories of race and diversity, and using oral history as a tool for social action.

I took a picture of a slide from one of the last sessions I attended in Detroit, which really seemed to capture my feelings about the conference. I look forward to seeing (and hopefully participating in!) the many positive changes in content and community that are happening in the History Museum field.

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I will be at both the AASLH (in my hometown of Detroit) and ASTC (in sunny Tampa) Conferences happening this month. I'd love any ExhibiTricks readers to say hello, either at one of my sessions or just in the hallways between sessions! It's great for me to connect real people to the anonymous numbers of ExhibiTricks subscribers in my analytics windows.

I really, really appreciate the now thousands and thousands(!) of readers and subscribers who check out ExhibiTricks every week, so I'd like to ask:

What motivates you to continue your own work?

Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

(And as always, feel free to email me to let me know if you have ideas for new posts or topics to include on ExhibiTricks.)

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Have some interesting or inspiring articles of your own to share? Post the links in the Comments Section below!

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Saturday, August 27, 2016

How can we ensure that everyone in our communities has access to the opportunities and benefits provided by museums and other cultural organizations?

That's a question that the museum field continues to struggle with, but I just became aware of two sets of resources that might help foster new ways to provide opportunities for increased communication and creative partnerships.

different ways in which “public engagement” can be defined and practiced,

the purposes public engagement has been used for in the arts, and

how the terms “audience” and “participant” have evolved and blurred over time.

The review also places public engagement in the context of one of the most important conversations taking place in arts and culture today, that of cultural equity and inclusion. (If you'd like to dig a little deeper, the Commission also published a literature review on cultural equity and inclusion earlier this year.)

I learned of the next set of resources through Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 blog:

A few years ago, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make changes in the ways that cultural organizations engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum, is an extraordinary program with a focus on community participation.

As all of these resources emphasize, public engagement is a powerful tool available to museums to help them work toward the goal of greater cultural equity and inclusion.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2016

A Cheetos Museum? Yes, Cheetos, and a number of other popular products and companies, are creating elaborate "museums" to promote their brands.

But are these really museums, or just cleverly-packaged pitches? As this article in Adweek makes clear, marketers see the immersive appeal of museum exhibits as a way to get consumers to pay more attention to their marketing messages for sustained periods of time.

From the article: "If you can make consumers walk through a museum, that's more time than these brands have ever been able to engage their customers over the course of time," said Nicole Ferry, partner and executive director of strategy at brand engagement firm Sullivan. "All of a sudden, they're able to tell their story in a way that isn't so transactional, and it builds a perception of that brand in a more specific way beyond product attributes."

Of course, before we, as museum professionals, say "how dare they?!?!" let's remember the many opportunities that a wide range of Art Museums haven taken to shill for fashion or automotive brands in exhibitions that many viewed as elaborate advertisements.

Of course a number of Children's Museums have appropriated nearly every available PBS or Nickolodeon cartoon character for traveling exhibitions (isn't it funny how book characters like Curious George or Clifford the Big Red Dog have been around for decades, but didn't become valuable exhibit commodities until they had their own TV shows?)

And many Science Museums (as highlighted by the folks at The Natural History Museum project) have even bigger issues with crossing the advertising/scholarship line when creating exhibitions on topics like climate change that are sponsored by energy companies or influenced by board members with ties to energy industries.

I'd like to think that there are firewalls and clear boundaries between the marketing messages and content messages inside museum exhibitions and programs, but sometimes I really wonder: Who's Pitching Who?

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Monday, August 8, 2016

Dear ExhibiTricks readers, I SWEAR to you that I had three calls last week that reminded me so much of this blog post from several years ago, that I felt compelled to bring it out for an encore to remind us (or me, at least) of why museum projects should (and shouldn't!) get started.

"We want to build the world's best science museum."

That's what the leader of a group of board members from an emerging museum said to me several months ago during our first lunch meeting.

My immediate reaction was to start laughing. But because: a) I wasn't raised by wolves, and b) my consulting business supports my wife, and our four kids, I instead nodded, and asked, "Well, what do you mean by best?"

Silence.

Silence and blank stares. It was like being in a meeting with an oil painting.

Finally, one of the board members cautiously said, "We'd like to have all the newest high-tech exhibits, but we want ours to be unique." Another said, "We think we should have an IMAX theater. But we'd like ours to be the biggest, so we could have a good PR angle to drum up more funding support."

I tried to redirect the conversation to get the board members to discuss WHY they wanted to start a science museum in the first place, to try to uncover and understand their passions about their soon-to-be (hopefully!) museum, but we just kept circling back to making the "world's best" museum --- and worse, the terms "best" and "biggest" now started getting used interchangeably.

What about starting a small demonstration site to get things started? No, not "sexy" enough. They "needed" to start BIG.

What about learning to build up internal capacity, so that staff and resources could be allocated to be able to create things locally, both internally, and collaboratively, with folks from local communities?

A new round of blank stares.

I could see this was going to end in tears, so I gently suggested that their project might not yet be at the stage where I could help them. This group seemed destined to be spinning this project around for years without it going anywhere.

I thanked them for the (soggy) sandwich, and drove off into the sunset.

Even though as a consultant, my brain is usually for rent, here are a few lessons I took away from this experience that I'm happy to share:

• You can't claim the title of "world's best" for yourself before you even start something (or even after you start something, for that matter.) It makes you seem arrogant and/or clueless.

When your visitors start telling all their friends to go to your museum, and better yet, start referring to the place as "their" museum, you will have started down the road to success.

• Start small, and build thoughtfully from there. It's o.k. to stay small in order to maintain quality.

• Focus on building internal capacity by investing in staff, training, and tools appropriate for your situation. Paradoxically, I like to teach museums and their staff how to "fish" (metaphorically speaking) rather than having them always feeling like they need to buy "fish" from folks outside of their organization.

Starting a museum is tough, but making sure your museum continues to improve and evolve after it opens, is even tougher. Good Luck! (and if you need help with a museum project that you would like to grow into being one of the "best" let me know.)

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Cara Dodge recently completed her master's work at John F. Kennedy University on humor and museums, and was kind enough to share some thoughts on the subject here on the ExhibiTricks blog. (Cara's entry is also cross-posted at the JFKU Museum Studies blog site.)

Most museums understand the importance of engaging with visitors, and we are constantly challenged to improve our relations with them. But, why does this have to be such a serious business? Why can’t we joke with our visitors the way that we do with our friends?

Humor in museums is not a new concept. You can find discussions about its presence in, and value to, museums on a variety of platforms (as shown in the three articles here, here, and here). Yet, when someone asks the question, “why did the chicken cross the road?” We don’t all jump up and shout, “to go to the museum!” How unfortunate!

I recently completed a master’s project titled “Humor me a moment: The power of humor in science museums” where I explored some of the current humor applications today, and some potential humor applications for science museums. In my research, I explored academic works from physiology, psychology, sociology, marketing, workplace relationships and education. I conducted a survey on the ASTC General Forum (maybe you saw it?) as well as 21 interviews with museum professionals mainly from science institution backgrounds. I also explored three examples of humor in science museums: the traveling exhibition Grossology, Science World’s ad campaigns, and at the Museum of Science in Boston, The Amazing Nano Brothers Juggling Show.

Humor is one tactic to emotionally engage visitors, and it can be a powerful one, but it shouldn't be approached light-heartedly (pun intended). Science museums understand the importance of engaging with their visitors. Humor can offer visitors a unique entry point into science museum content that otherwise may feel out of reach.

Humor is ambiguous, but can help us learn about visitors

Humor is not consistently defined across disciplines, but everyone seems to have a definition. When I asked interviewees and survey respondents how they defined humor, every one of them gave an answer. However, those answers produced a wide variety of definitions, from the utilitarian, “humor is something that makes you laugh,” to deeper notions on humor’s purpose in our lives. At the outset, this may seem like a challenge to the museum field, but in fact this slight variation and ambiguity can help science museum professionals decipher visitor humor personality.

Coded interview responses to, “How would you define
humor?”

In the literature, humor seems to be described most often by three theories: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and relief theory. Superiority theory suggests that humor is a technique that proffers the joke teller (or the wit) to be superior over the joke subject (or the butt). Incongruity theory describes that a deviation from our basic fundamental expectations results in a humorous situation (here is a great study that supports incongruity theory through studying nonsense words). Relief theory focuses more on our physical reaction to humor—namely the laugh itself—and supposes that humor is really an expression of our internal relief that something isn’t want it seems to be.

Any humorous situation could be adequately described by all three theories, and by extension these theories can help museums scaffold their thinking about who visitors through how they are using humor. Superiority theory suggests that when visitors joke, they’re pointing out an imbalance, either emotionally or socially. Therefore, science museum professionals might take note and look into what that imbalance might be. Incongruity theory suggests that, if a visitor finds something humorous, it is because there has been a deviation from what they expect—a useful piece of information for those who want to know what visitors expect coming through the doors. Finally, relief theory suggests a bodily experience, which could be harnessed as another tool in the experience curation we all strive to achieve.

Humor captures attention and helps people feel more comfortable, but it’s unclear if it helps people learn

One of the most interesting results from my research was the clear contrast whether or not humor is helpful in a learning environment. On the one hand, advocates for humor in learning note that humor can ease tension and create environments where people want to learn. On the other hand, critics of humor suggest that it can be distracting from content and in fact hinders learning, and so caution museum educators against its use.

What is undeniably interesting is humor’s uncanny ability to capture attention, and that may be where science museums can benefit from its use, despite whether or not it has the ability to teach. In advertising (an industry that spends laughable amounts of money trying to get our attention), humor has become more and more prevalent as a tool for engaging with customers. Super Bowl ads, some of the most expensive ads produced, are often funny. In fact, according to USA Today, 95% of those who watch the ads prefer ads with humor.

Humor can build relationships through increased trust

Humor allows us to bare our vulnerability, whether it is an opinion or fear, which can be accepted or rejected by our listener. If our humor is accepted, we have increased a level of trust between the listener and ourselves—they agree with us! Trust is something science museums should want to build with their visitors. Visitors should want to trust that what they see and experience in a science museum is as close to the truth as conceivably possible. Humor can add a lot of value to this equation by simply breaking down what can be an intimidating and authoritative museum voice. If we take ourselves less seriously, our visitors may find us more approachable and trustworthy.

Humor doesn’t always have a positive outcome, and in some situations it can cause serious damage. I would venture a guess that we all have heard (or even made) a joke that not only did not land well; one that caused your listener to sit straight up with offense. As I mentioned above, one can either accept or reject your humor, and it can be pretty terrible when it’s the latter.

Part of a Science World ad campaign

However, what really intrigued me was the fact that there seemed to be two situations where humor was offensive. Either the topic was already provocative, or humor was used almost as a defense mechanism. In the former, was the offense totally because of the humor? Did the humor make it worse? In the latter, what does that mean about the role of humor in difficult situations? These questions beg deeper understanding through further research.

In the end, humor needs buy-in

Humor is not something that can be stapled to the wall, propped up against the membership desk, or sent via mass email to the entire staff. Humor, in its most successful form, is part of institutional personality. Restated, humor needs buy-in from all levels of an organization.

Many of the museum professionals I consulted for this project often mentioned that their attempts were first met with institutional criticism, and I’m not surprised. Humor takes on the aura of undermining authority or contrasting the seriousness of an issue, but I believe that these are the places where we have some of the biggest potential to engage with our visitors. As Paul himself noted in an interview with me, “no one wants to come to the museum and feel stupid when they leave!”

Whether we want to admit it or not, we cannot deny that humor is part of our human nature. Our visitors come to our museums with the intention of learning something, visiting with their friends and family, and generally enjoying a visit to the science museum. Humor has the ability to engage with visitors in all three of these areas. The communication gap does not have to be so large between our visitors and ourselves, as science museum professionals, and frankly, that gap can close with the power of humor.

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